


The Nonbeliever

by DropsOfJupiterOnARavenclaw



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boys In Love, Character Study, Dean Winchester Saves Castiel, Dean Winchester-centric, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, John Winchester Has Issues, M/M, One Shot, Originally Posted on Tumblr, POV Second Person, Personal Growth, Reflection, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:48:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29018457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DropsOfJupiterOnARavenclaw/pseuds/DropsOfJupiterOnARavenclaw
Summary: "So this is the life. One day you're reading your father's journal for the first time. You are 24 years old and he is gone. There is a passage where he talks about how he had already been happily married when he was your age, how he knew you would never be because his mission comes before your life."This is supposed to prove that you can write an ending that mirrors the beginning without turning the whole story into its own anti-thesis.(Started as a Tumblr post but turned long enough to be worth posting here)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	The Nonbeliever

So this is the life. One day you're reading your father's journal for the first time. You are 24 years old and he is gone. There is a passage where he talks about how he had already been happily married when he was your age, how he knew you would never be because his mission comes before your life. 

You tell yourself it's alright, at least you have a reason to see your little brother again, you have a car and a mission and what else do you need? Your father wasn't really there even when he was, but now he's gone and you're free. But your brother is miserable and you feel so guilty for your freedom. What is a soldier without someone's orders to follow? 

But your brother doesn't need you to be a soldier, so slowly you start to be yourself again instead, after almost forgetting what that even means. Apparently, it means burdens and pain and a never-ending job but it also means open roads, good music you can play as loudly as you like, and easy quips between you and your brother. You can taste freedom but it's never quite yours. You stay busy, ensuring strangers have what can never be yours and it's your type of normal. 

But you never stop feeling like a soldier, waiting for an order from a father who has abandoned you. Every page in that diary is a reminder of your failures but you force yourself to read it all, again, and again, and again. After all, pain has always been the only constant in your life. 

Years pass and you know you're living in a dead man's image, always seeking revenge or making amends or fixing unfixable mistakes, always living in the past. But in the end, there is always your brother, the car, a gun, and some monster to kill. So you endure it. As long as you're suppressing all your emotions it's not even half bad. He would have wanted this for you and maybe you don't deserve better. After all, his diary is very insistent on your failures, almost as insistent as he was. 

So you're 28 and you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. You went to hell and came back, literally. You're more broken than ever before and somehow just the same. Because again all you can think is that you failed your duties as a soldier and the guilt is your constant companion but you know how to hide it. Technically you're older than 28 but that hardly matters, you never lived a life right for your age anyways. 

At least now you have an excuse, a reason to be broken. Not that that fixes anything, the world is doomed because of you and you can't help but think that you should have known you'd be the cause of it. Nothing good comes of what you do, you the soldier who needs orders as much as he despises them. 

Yet somehow you're alive when you shouldn't be. You got another chance to see your brother, your car, your gun, live your life right this time. Do better. Be better. It's still a shitty life but it's yours and you're still a soldier only now you have a calling again. An Angel has put his trust in you and you know you don't deserve it but you want it anyways. 

You weren't dead because you were in hell, you were dead because your brother couldn't need you anymore and your father could give you no orders, so you gave up and that was what killed you.  
Before you know it, your mission mingles with the taste of freedom that shouldn't be yours. Somehow it's easier to take orders from an Angel than from your father. It's less personal at first, and then so much, much, more personal. 

You remember the first case you ever took on alone, you were 17. You did what was expected of you, but it didn't leave you cold as it would now. You hadn't chosen that case like you haven't chosen your current calling. 

Never before did you feel the urge to pray, you had no reason to believe in a world that had given you nothing and demanded everything. Your father didn't believe either but then again, you are starting to think that he wasn't right about everything, that there were things he didn't know. Now praying comes to you more naturally than it should after a lifetime of doubt but there is only one Angel you pray to. 

The ghosts of those two nuns would never find peace, in life, their only crime had been existing. Yet your father made it clear that that's what it was, a crime. They seemed innocent to you but you weren't supposed to think. You knew what it meant then and you know it now. You don't get why that case keeps popping in your head whenever you look at him though. 

Your belated doubt in your father feels like falling from faith. Every step a betrayal to the person you were supposed to be. You know what he would say to you if he were here, and somehow having it in your head is worse than hearing him say it. You try not to trust this Angel. You try to keep control over your brother for his own good. You fail at both and are forced to recognize it to be better that way. You are not alone. With them, you are stronger, but you can't lose the feeling that in not shouldering this burden alone you are a disappointment. 

You haven't made a decision he would have approved off in a long time, but he isn't here. You pretend you don't know that he wouldn't approve. He doesn't know what you have faced and would have recoiled in horror if he did. Somehow you miss the simplicity he had forced on you while resenting him for it all the same. You wish you could follow one last order without questioning it and at the same time you wish you had questioned all of his orders. 

You remember that case again, how their bones burned, and a part of you with them. You were 17 and it was the only time you questioned one of your father's rules. You never figured out how he knew, but you were filled with dread and shame just the same. It's the same feeling that comes over you now, every time you long to ask this strange Angel to stay but you are far from admitting that to yourself. 

They stay on your mind. You think your father wanted you to know that your crime too, was to exist. Should you be like them, you needed to burn, like them. Your Angel tells you that Heaven isn't concerned with who people love and somehow that makes it better. You don't care for heaven, but you care for him, so as long as he believes what he told you, you allow yourself some doubt. 

Somehow you now finally trust your brother, you see what he saw, you can finally tell that it was your father who was wrong, that his orders were cruel, that you can be good without being what he wanted you to be. He didn't know of Angels, he would have tried to kill them if he did. But there is one Angel in your life who is better than all the others, you know you'll never kill him come what may. Take what your father would have wanted you to do with you to the grave. 

But you've been to hell and back and you always have one more problem to deal with.  
One day between two cases you're on the road, in your car, with your brother, and everything is normal. Only that there is an Angel on the backseat and he is staring out the window at the nightly landscape of a city and somehow that's normal too. He is older than the city or the ground it was built on, he has seen more than all people currently living on the planet combined, and yet he chose to be there, with you, on the road. And you know you don't deserve him but you've come too far to question it now. 

Occasionally you find yourself praying and you have stopped wondering why. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking you're praying when really there is just a single name on your lips. You know why, but you pretend like you don't. So long as he wants to stay with you, you are happy to let him. 

Fate is against you though, against the both of you. You get separated time and time again and you keep thinking that you should stay away for his sake but the world dwindles whenever you do. You need him and it scares you but you can't admit that because nothing is supposed to scare you. Fighting with him by your side becomes second nature, saving each other time and time again like it's the most normal thing there is, and in a way it is because when his life is at stake you won't lose time asking questions. He brings out the best and the worst in you and accepts all of it. 

You are still broken but now there is an Angel with you. An Angel who is losing his faith in his father, God, in a way that is jarringly familiar for you. There is something about that kind of betrayal and terror that only fathers can inspire. The guilt that it filled you with, the emptiness that replaced it. 

Only that, ironically, the thing that made you find faith again, maybe for the first time, was the Angel who lost his. He tells you he is beginning to doubt and in the most wonderful contradiction, that is what makes you believe in miracles for the first time in your life. The joy doesn't last because now he is looking to you for direction even though all your choices keep leading to misery. 

He is family now, inexplicably tied to you, probably from the moment he pulled you out of hell. Only that now you can see it, how real he is, how good, and how he matters so much more than the image of a dead man. You can't tell him though, you've learned if you name a good thing it'll leave you. 

He is an Angel and you are the broken shell of a human but your pieces have begun to mend thanks to him. At your most destroyed, you found faith and the will to go on, thanks to him. He saved you when he pulled you out of hell, but he also saved you when he gave you a reason to keep going and an inclination  
of what faith could feel like. 

You know you'll never believe in heaven even though you know it exists, but he was always worth your prayers and for some reason, he thinks you are worth listening to. It's wonderful insanity, the countless people who believe in heaven and you who can't believe despite knowing it exists. Because heaven is here, as long as he is with you.

And that's the problem. The most awe-inspiring presence in your life, your source of hope, your reason to go on, is a man. An Angel, yes, but also a man. He doesn't belong here and he belongs nowhere more than here. 

Sometimes you wonder, he has rebuilt you entirely, how is it possible that he can stand you? He's seen the inside of your head and yet he is still here. That makes you feel better than it should. Your own father could hardly stand you and yet this Angel who knows you far better than he ever did has decided to stay, he has no obligation toward you, and yet he stays. It's intoxicating, dizzying, addicting. It's too much. 

He is always there and yet there is nothing that can keep him for long, the only moments he allows himself to linger are when he's talking to you, and it's starting to go to your head. It's irritating at first but the irritation quickly turns into fondness as the moments in which he stays grow ever longer. 

Before you know it he is more constant than absent, no longer a mystery. You think you know him, even if not as well as he knows you, which never fails to send a shiver through you. You long for him to stay and it shocks you that you're even capable of feeling that way. You can't tell him to stay so you try to show him but it always goes wrong. You know what your father would say, you can see the disappointment in his eyes just as clear as the worry in your brothers'. 

So you chase the prayers out of your mind because you know the consequences, know what your father would say, know that your Angel would never listen to one of your prayers again if he knew. Yet he is always there when you ask for him and the knowledge alone is driving you insane. You wonder how much he knows but he is unreadable. 

You've lost him more times than you can count, you've lost yourself each time too. There is a sparkle in his eyes whenever you welcome him back because you can't stay apart, not even through death. You can see the life you want in his eyes because it's him you want. Once you picked up the habit, you never stopped praying, always to him, no matter how distant he seemed. Each prayer is followed by waves of guilt. 

There is still a job to be done and it's grating on you, you know that you can never be free and the anger helps you fight. Worse than that, life is cruel to your Angel and he is still your reason to keep fighting but sometimes he is also your reason to stop when your anger is getting the best of you. 

Years pass and you can't imagine life without him. You thought you'd die an alcoholic fallen to insanity and revenge, now you hardly drink and insanity doesn't bother you anymore. Sanity in a life like yours was just a lack of knowledge after all. You've lost track of how often you died or how old you are supposed to be. You have fought everything in the book and you'd do it all again. You find happiness in small moments like shared bottles of beer after a job well done or conversations with your brother that don't revolve around the end of the world. 

Especially those moments when you're hardly in the picture, listening to your brother and your Angel while they think you're asleep on a particularly long drive. Your two favorite people in existence get along just fine under normal circumstances and there is nothing that can quite match that happiness. 

He has impressed you in more ways than you can count, in strength and skill but also in kindness and loyalty. You marvel at his very existence and hope he can't hear your thoughts of adoration as if your face doesn't betray them just as well. 

In every reunion there is hope and your bond grows stronger, it's no longer this invisible thing that you can hide. Because after all, your Angel fell for you. He brought down heaven, for you. Everyone who knows you knows him too, knows you can't be separated, and they talk. You hear the whispers but you've stopped caring. Your father will never be the wiser as long as you just don't give in. 

You suppress your feelings like you suppress everything because they're worse than failing an order or not receiving one in the first place. It's having an order and deliberately going against it. It's fighting yourself like you fought the ghosts of your very first case; alone and afraid. Every now and again your brother tries to comfort you just like he did then but you push him away now too. His knowing looks haunt you. 

One of the earliest, most deeply anchored rules within you, 'if you are like that, feel like that, you should burn'. And you can't even uphold that. So you bury it within you like you always do. 

Sometimes you think he knows, you catch your Angel looking back, sometimes you catch a taste of what it could be like, sometimes it feels like a possibility so close to reality, reaching out once is all it would take. But you can't do that, can't corrupt an honest to god Angel of the lord. So you keep your distance and torture yourself with it but you know torture like an old friend and it's endurable. 

At least he is still there, and you are content. After years of pain, content feels dangerously close to bliss. It's more than you should have but you can't let go. More often than not, you know that he doesn't really want you and it makes it easier to bear, it hurts less than thinking you might have a chance. You get comfortable with what you can't have. 

Along the way you let more people in your heart than you ever thought possible and most of them pay the price. You hate yourself more with each death and the deaths keep coming. 

You call him a friend. Best friend. Family. But never yours. You'd burn the world for him and he doesn't even know it. He would burn the world for you and it is wrong how happy that makes you. But it's all blown out of proportion, he's an Angel, he doesn't know better than all or nothing, he doesn't know that he is doing more than a friend should. He doesn't know how he makes your heart flutter with each show of loyalty. 

Your father's voice in your head has become background noise. You taught an Angel about free will, pretending like you weren't learning of it for the first time too and you still struggle to grasp how well it worked out. 

In the end, you find yourself fighting to live rather than just survive, because of him.  
Somehow you've found a home along the way. You have everything that was never supposed to be yours but it all comes with a catch. Your brother is there because he can't be anywhere else, your Angel is there but he isn't yours, you have a home now but it's also a war base. It's the most normal your life has ever been and you are still doing your job, it helps combat the guilt. You wouldn't have it any other way and some days you think your Angel and your brother agree. 

The challenges don't stop coming but you settle in a sort of routine forged by unbreakable trust in your family. It's clearer to you than ever that you are no longer 24, your father is long gone, you have learned what freedom means and will fight tooth and nail to keep it. 

Naturally, that is when it gets snatched away from you again. After you thought you had lost and regained, through hardship, everything that matters to you. Your story ends as it began, an absent father figure screwing you over in ways you only comprehend years down the road. After being thrown around time and time again you decided, no, not this time. 

With everything you've learned through a lifetime of misery, you are prepared to do what it takes. Your brother and your Angel are with you, it's clearer than ever that they have suffered as you have. Normally you'd force them to safety but they have a right to this fight as much as you do so you grit your teeth through the worry and fight on. No longer a soldier, but so much more lethal in the desperation of a mortal man who has everything at stake. 

For the first time you wish you had sorted out this thing between you and your Angel, but that would have taken the nerves only people without an apocalypse on their hands can spare. In the end, you'll die fighting with him and for him, whether he knows or not. 

But brilliant and nonhuman as he is, he won't have it. So in the single most painful moment, he takes the choice away from you. He looks at you like he had expected you to say something first, hurt through years of silence. Your heart damn near fails because you can already feel the soul-deep sorrow settling over you. And he says to you everything you ever wanted to hear and never dared to hope for. And he says it to you as he dies. 

This time you know you'll go mad. There is no coming back from the edge of that cliff but you'll make sure to drag the responsible down with you. You don't know what hurts worse, knowing you wasted a lifetime to cowardice or knowing he was waiting for you to do something while you ignorantly vowed never to bother him. That he wanted it too. Wanted you. 

Your head is ringing with how wrong you were as you lean against that wall, sobbing. You're inconsolable and pathetic and you know it. You long for death almost as much as you long for him to come back or even just a chance to make it right, but you don't die. You have to pick yourself up in the end, you have to tell a child his father died, and you have to seek revenge. But you are not your father, this is your revenge, not the kids. 

Memories you didn't know you had come back to you. Late nights with your Angel's head rested on your shoulder in a rare tranquility, hugs that lasted longer than you thought they had, last words that were tempered with, and goodbyes changed ever so slightly that their meaning would never be the same. You treasure it all even as it hurts enough to burn away your very essence. 

You don't know who took them from you in the first place, if your own father had enough of a hold on your mind to destroy you for years to come or if the mightiest of absent fathers of them all had tempered with your mind on purpose. But they are back and you will never let them go. 

You like to think he knew, it's what keeps you from falling over the edge too soon. You need more time to feel what you've done, to realize the full damage of your silence. The longer he is gone, the closer you get to your goal, your final kill, the more you see you never stood a chance but if it wasn't for you Angel you wouldn't even have come as far as you did. It is in his memory that you keep going. 

You think of the child that you unwittingly adopted, of how your Angel would want you to watch out for the child, and you keep going. One last apology your Angel will never hear as you finally accept this child doomed to death as your own. You don't have the time but you want to be better than your father, you think the kid knows. You know the kid loved your Angel almost as much as you do. You will never think of him in past tense, you will never stop praying, you will never stop loving him and the realization hits you harder than any of your deaths. You love him and it's the first time you allow yourself to think it, you love him, and it's too late. 

You can't help but wonder when your life became so complicated, and how it failed to feel complicated just so long as your Angel was there. 

You win the fight, you had to, there was never another option, the memories are what carries you through it. Before you know better you are by the side of a foreign road and dread settles over you as the adrenalin wears off. It's over, you no longer have a cause, you have nothing to fight for, you won the ultimate fight and you're free and more miserable than you've been since hell. You're so broken that it's almost enough to convince you he will show up. 

The kid is gone too but your brother is with you, somehow he isn't surprised about the grief you can no longer hide. No matter how bad things get, he understands you, but it's only a mild comfort. Your last responsibility is to keep it together for him but he hardly needs you anymore. 

You're back on the road, with your brother and your car, and your gun, and even though you are free it's no longer enough. It will never be enough again. 

Nothing in life was ever handed to you and you can't go on without him so you decide you won't. You have a choice to make, possibly your last choice. 

Either you follow him into death and are finally done with all the pain, or you seek even more impossible challenges, ask for even more hurt, and try to get him back. You've done the impossible before, giving up now after you got all your hope through him for so long would be an ultimate betrayal. 

Even when he is dead, he is the reason you are alive. He is what changed the story, what turned the tide, what no final monster could predict, what you yourself still don't understand. It all pans down to what he sees in you, how he is willing to disobey all he ever knew for you, how he loves you. Nobody saw coming how he would love you to completion, least of all you., 

Glancing at your little brother, you know there is only one choice for you, letting him down had never been an option and you're not sure if you're thinking about your Angel or the brother who would otherwise lose you again. It doesn't matter, you have made your choice. 

Dying would be an easy out, and your life was never easy. A while ago you decided that you wanted to live, peace be damned, and your Angel deserves to live more than anyone. If he stays dead then you lost after all, and failure isn't an option. 

It takes a long time but in the end, your brother and your son are with you as you retrieve your Angel. It nearly killed all of you,b but you are not the only one who owes the Angel, all of you soldier on with purpose, no matter what happens. You are restless and hardly dare to hope but he is so worth it all. 

Another fight, more pain, both pale in comparison to what's at stake. You will get him back or die trying, you've never been so sure of anything. You're a soldier once more but willingly this time, this time it's for a cause you believe in. 

When you see his face again it's the most religious experience of your lifetime. He meets your eyes with hesitation and a decade of suppressed emotions is strangulating you. You can't speak but you have so much to say and you are done allowing yourself to hide. 

You kiss him and it's the truest thing you've ever done. You're alive and praying like never before that he wants it to. A second later he kisses you back and you have no intention of ever letting him go. All the grief and pain fall off of you and all that matters are his lips against yours. Finally, finally, finally. 

You allow yourself to hold him pressed against you and he is holding onto you for dear life, mumbling your name in the crook of your neck and you still don't know what to say or what you did to deserve him but you think he gets it anyways. He sounds as disbelieving as you feel and it's perfect. 

You don't even hear the startled but obviously delighted chuckle from your brother several steps behind you, nor do you see the blinding smile on your son's face, but right there, in that moment, you know you've won. 

Before you know it you're 42, and you are happier than you've ever been and you think about your father's diary and all the things you weren't supposed to have but you can finally no longer hear his voice. 

There is an Angel by your side as you watch tv and he is so much more real than the pages of some old diary. The world didn't want to make space for you, so you cut your place into it by force and it was well and truly worth the struggle. 

You found a home in a place meant for war, a routine in a job that had none, love in a being that wasn't supposed to care, and trust in a brother you should have given up on according to your father. Everything in your life is a contradiction and it took so long, almost more strength than you had, but now you have it all. 

Your Angel is leaning against your chest and you wonder how the purest happiness can be hidden so plainly in normalcy and all you need is the freedom to take it. You are happier than your father ever would have been had he lived. Your life and his life looked drastically different at 24, but you're here now where he was then in a way, but he isn't here and it's finally okay to just be. 

You think to yourself, 'so this is the life' and one day, you're reading your father's journal for the last time. You are 42 years old and he is finally truly gone, no traces of him linger in your mind. Now you know, a soldier without order will always remain a soldier, but he will also be free.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi and thank you for reading!  
> Please note that english isn't my first language, however, constructive criticism is very much welcome! Please leave a comment and tell me what you thought! I hope you enjoyed it!  
> (After that clusterfuck of a finale, any distraction is welcome)


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